New York Times columnist John Tierney got it all wrong. Let’s set the record straight on why recycling matters for our climate and our future.

Recycling IS Our Future

The recent New York Times op-ed, “Reign of Recycling” by John Tierney is dead wrong about recycling and completely misses the big picture: We live on a beautiful and finite planet that we are trashing at a rapid rate. Recycling, a central tenet of Zero Waste, has a critical role to play in turning this daunting situation around.

Nearly 20 years ago, The Times published a similar article by Tierney, “Recycling is Garbage,” which dismissed recycling’s importance using the same stale arguments.

Saving landfill space is not a compelling reason to recycle. Besides, municipal landfills are full of toxics, and they leak all too often. The good news is that if we maximize our recycling potential and practice Zero Waste, then we either won’t need to build more landfills or we’ll need far fewer of them.

Recycling is good for business.

Who says so? Industry titans including General Motors, Toyota, Sierra Nevada and Xerox—all recycle and have committed to Zero Waste to improve their bottom line. And wait, there’s more: corporate giants Unilever, Philips, Google and Hewlett Packard are embracing the circular economy as the new way of doing business.

Tierney argues that we should recycle only those materials that have the biggest climate impact and calls out plastic bottles for having a relatively small impact—the key word here being “relative.” This is wrong on two fronts.

First, climate change is an urgent, global challenge that requires many solutions, including recycling plastics, if we are to have any hope of avoiding the worst impacts of climate change. Clearly, we need a myriad of solutions to help us counter the effects of greenhouse gas emissions.

Low commodity prices are not a sign that recycling isn’t worth it as Tierney suggests.

Sure, the recycling industry is affected by the global economy, and U.S. exports are down, partly due to the strong dollar, putting recycling in a slump. But if we gave up on recycling, then we’d forego the huge economic, social and environmental benefits of conserving natural resources and reducing greenhouse gas emissions, which Tierney downplays. (See Grist’s great response.)

Our supplies of fresh water, fossil fuels, metals and other resources ARE already scarce and limited in parts of the world.

Will we run out completely? Probably not, but these materials may become so expensive that only the super-rich or uber-powerful will have access to them. In the next 50 years, we’re likely to run out of silver, copper, and oil, just to name a few. Prices are projected to rise and communities and business are investing in recycling to meet rising global demand. Recycling significantly extends the life of many materials, sometimes indefinitely as is the case with aluminum.

THE SHIFT TO ZERO WASTE

And here’s the biggest thing that’s changed since 1996: Communities around the world are not only embracing recycling, they’re going for Zero Waste.

Zero Waste asks us to reimagine how we live and what we truly value. It requires creativity, ingenuity, and perseverance to redesign our systems and resource use — from product design to disposal— so that we can use fewer resources, conserve energy, mitigate climate change, reduce water usage, prevent the creation of toxins, and stop ecosystem destruction. Zero Waste also captures materials we would normally throw away and uses them, instead of natural resources, to make new products, creating far less pollution and feeding local economies.

And as luck would have it, Zero Waste turns out to be one of the fastest, easiest, most cost-effective ways a community can reduce its climate impact. It’s time to stop whining about taking out the recycling and get busy building the Zero Waste communities of the future. Our kids will thank us.